As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Power supplies are used in information handling systems to provide electrical energy to an information handling system and the various information handling resources thereof. In many applications, power supplies convert alternating current (AC) electrical energy (e.g., from a public power grid) to direct current (DC) electrical energy, and deliver the DC electrical energy to information handling resources via suitable electrical conductors (e.g., one or more power busses coupling information handling resources to the power supplies).
In many implementations, power supplies are capable of being provided in a redundant configuration. For example, power demands of an information handling system (or a collection of a plurality of information handling systems) may require an amount of power significantly less than that of the capacity of the available power supplies. Nonetheless, to ensure adequate power is provided in the event of a failure of an individual power supply, a particular number of power supplies may be enabled (e.g., made “active”) so as to provide a desired level of redundancy, despite the fact that the aggregate capacity of the enabled power supplies may be well in excess of that required to satisfy the power requirements of a system.
Oftentimes, for a particular level of redundancy of power capacity requirement for a system, there may exist a configuration of enabled and disabled power supplies such that the particular configuration yields a power efficiency greater than that of another possible configuration satisfying the redundancy and capacity requirements of the system. “Power efficiency” of a power supply may mean the ratio of DC power delivered by a power supply to the AC power supplied to the power supply. “Aggregate power efficiency” of an enabled set of power supplies may mean the ratio of the aggregate DC power delivered by the enabled power supplies to the aggregate AC power supplied to the enabled power supplies.
Traditional approaches to determination of an optimum configuration for power supplies have many disadvantages. For example, for a particular redundancy policy and capacity requirement for a system with six power supplies, there may be 26=64 possible configurations. Calculating efficiency for all of such configurations may require excessive computation that may undesirably tax system resources. In addition, the universe of possible configurations increases as the number of power supplies increase, further increasing complexity in larger systems.
In addition, it may in many cases be undesirable to switch from one configuration to another if such switch involves enabling multiple additional power supplies and/or disabling multiple power supplies. Such enabling and disabling of multiple power supplies may cause a current and/or voltage impulse in a power system that may cause harmful effects to information handling resources and/or the power supplies themselves.